Oscar-winning actor Cate Blanchett has told reporters that she is putting her film career on the backburner as she prepares to take up the reins at the Sydney Theatre Company as co-artistic director with her husband, playwright Andrew Upton, in January 2008.

"The acceptance for the role of co-artistic director of this company is not a dalliance," Blanchett told reporters in Sydney today, after officially accepting the position. "It's an absolutely firm commitment, and it is not one that Andrew nor myself have made lightly," she said.

The Australian-born actor said the artistic director role would become her new full-time job, although she and Upton would be free for three months each year to pursue their own projects. The couple, who have two small children, will write and act with the company, and will steer its programming.

Blanchett is currently preparing to direct her first project for the company, Harold Pinter's A Kind Of Alaska, at the end of the month.

The actor is currently on screens in three awards-worthy pictures this season: opposite Brad Pitt in Alejandro González Iñárritu's acclaimed drama Babel, with Judi Dench in Richard Eyre's Notes on a Scandal, and opposite George Clooney in Steven Soderbergh's The Good German.